林光挺文献集简介

Summary

Mr Lim Kong Thing was a successful businessman and a renowned community leader of Kuala Pilah in Negri Sembilan, who was very well connected to other countries in Southeast Asia and China. He was a strong supporter of Tongmenghui (led by Dr Sun Yat Sen) and served as advisor to the Committee of Overseas Chinese Affairs. After his passing in 1940 at the age of 61, he left behind some 800 pages of documents, comprising eulogies, elegies, correspondence, photographs, notices and other ephemeral materials. The collection was donated to the National Library in 2007 by his youngest son, Mr Lin Qiong, a retired teacher and writer who is now 78 years old. The collection offers an insight to the Chinese diaspora of pre-WWII Malaya and Southeast Asia, and the socio-economic network and connection as well as the political alignment and allegiance of the Chinese overseas in Southeast Asia in the first half of the 20th century. Besides its historical and research value, the collection has its cultural significance and calligraphic merits as many of the manuscripts were written by well-known personalities such as Zhou Enlai, Chiang-Soong Mei-ling, Sun Ke (son of Dr Sun Yat Sen), Chen Shuren, Yu Youren and Yu Dafu. It is amazing that the collection was not destroyed before or during the Japanese occupation of Malaya and Singapore in the 1940s as many of the documents were very sensitive and would have cost the lives of those whose names were listed in the six volumes of documents. The National Library has recently digitised the collection so that users can have access to its content via the Internet.